Excel Plugin for Water Tanks
This week, I will talk about DevCreate Solutions LLP‘s new Excel Plugin. As we all know, Excel is still widely used by Structural Engineers to do a variety of calculations. We all can attest to the fact that each one has his/her own Excel which is “perfect” but this can rapidly create problems for newcomers to the team or if someone leaves the team. To overcome this little problem, we can safely be in the familiar “Excel” environment but with a bit of automation through the Plugin.
Plugin
Let’s dive into what this Plugin is all about. The first step is installing the Plugin.
Once you install this, you will be able to see “Structure Design” on the Ribbon. You can select “Water Tank”—> “Rectangle” or “Circular”. For this discussion, I am selecting “Rectangle”. Once the selection is done, you will get the Inputs on the left side pane.
Input Pane
The input pane as shown above has different tabs for entering the inputs.
- Tank Data
- Tank Internal Dimensions
- Properties of Soil
- Material Properties
- Reinforcement Details
- Rates
The inputs will be prefilled with Default values wherever possible. You can navigate through the tabs & and enter the appropriate values.
Tab Walkthrough
Once you are satisfied with the inputs, click on “Check Design”
The plugin will process the given inputs and it will generate the report with detailed calculations on the right-hand side.
The report is subdivided into 4 parts
- Design Summary
- Detailed Design
- Qty Estimation
- Bill of Quantity
Please refer to the Report Tab Walkthrough below for high level idea about the Tabs in the output report and the extent of the calculations we are performing.
Report Tab Walkthrough
The same flow is available for the Circular Water tanks as well. This plugin is currently designed according to the Indian Code but will be able to customize the same as per any Design Code.
Please feel free to contact me for any queries/comments/quotes.
We will be more than happy to arrange a demo for you either online/or offline( in Pune & and surrounding areas).